I'm Chris and I am addicted to yard sales, garage sales, thrift stores and bargain hunting in general. Visit my site yardsalequeen.com - which I started in 1996.
"Smile" and "VV" (Vintage Value) are the names of two thrift stores I regularly shop at.
I grew up in Clifton Park NY but now live in Lusby, MD. I also lived in other exciting locales such as Schenectady, Watervliet (NY), and Charleston, SC.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Oscar night now always reminds me of Oscar Night 2000, when I gave birth to Jacob. I don't remember much of the awards - actually the only thing I remember was seeing a very preggo Annette Benning and thinking "She looks waaaayyyy more pregnant than me! Why isn't she suffering now like I am!"

I got a nice piece of junk mail yesterday that included a free $1 bill. I'm no marketing genius but I think sending free money to people in order to try to get more money is pretty stupid. I figure I already give a lot to charities when I shop and donate at my non-profit thrifts. So I think this dollar is destined to be spent in one of them. (The Warning sticker on the envelope is warning people (postal workers?) that it's illegal to knowingly interfere with the delivery of mail.)

Saturday, February 24, 2007

My favorite buy of the week was a Puffy dog from the movie There's Something About Mary. Paid .25 for him. Makes me think back to the first time I saw this movie in 1998. My husband and I were on a cruise and we made a stop in Cancun for a day. Since we had just spent a week in Cancun in 1997, we decided to spend a portion of the day at the movies. It was in English with Spanish subtitles. We even got a promo package of There's Something About Mary hair gel.

Friday, February 23, 2007

My husband's work had a party last week at the M&T Stadium in Baltimore. Yummy buffet dinner, lots of door prizes - we won a $200 Ipod Nano!!!! - and music by a 22 piece band. I highly recommend them the next time you need a 22 piece band for your function, visit them on the web at Mood Swings I even got dragged on the dance floor once. I uploaded the video to my Myspace page (click on videos there) and you can hear my scream.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Well it rained yesterday so schools were closed 2 hours early. And they are closed today due to icy roads. Probably just in the northern part of the county - there's puddles in my driveway here in the southern part of the county.

All I can say is there better be school tomorrow!! The kids are off on Friday and Monday for teacher in-service day and President's Day. And the thing is, when schools are closed, Smile is closed. Not going to Smile on a Wednesday throws me off for the rest of the week! And since there was another snow day last Wedneday, I am really not liking this trend.

I did manage to get to VV yesterday and bought a pair of funky red ostrich clogs made by Dansko. They definitely caught my eye and the price was right.

Going to make some cake mix cookies with Jacob today for Valentine's Day. (Take a dry cake mix, mix in an egg and some oil, form into cookies and bake).

Also have to start doing some body maintenance for an upcoming semi-formal party that I'm going to on Friday night. Today my plan is to hide my greys. I was going to have a manicure tomorrow, but right now my nails are so short, its probaby not worth it. I can do my nails myself.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Well I am still looking thru pictures that I've taken over the last year or two and came across this one. (By the same token, I'm also trying to catch up in my magazine reading....currently reading the October 2005 issue of People and reading how Jennifer Aniston has a hot new romance with Vince Vaughn and Nick Lachey is quoted as saying "everything's perfect" (regarding his wife Jessica Simpson).

So anyways, this book cover is kind of interesting if you're a Rachael Ray fan. I am, I love hearing her mention her upbringing in upstate NY on her tv show since it's only about "10 exits" away from where I grew up. She was on a local tv cooking show with this local tv news anchor. Egads! No wardrobe stylist and she's not even using a Rachael Ray knife! My mom bought the cookbook for a .25 at a garage sale (and no, she doesn't want to sell it). And its even autographed.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

so no yardsales for me today. I did go to Smile this week and buy a few goodies, like a bottle of Victoria Secret Very Sexy for Her perfume and lotion at $1 each. At VV, I bought Jacob some Super Nintendo games at .50 each.

In going thru my old pictures - I found this one I took several months ago. It's a typical Wednesday morning at Smile - a line of people gather waiting for the doors to open. (Smile is closed Sun-Tuesday so people know that Wednesday is the best day for the best selection - although they continuously put out new stuff).

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Well I do. In today's mail I got a $8.60 rewards gift card from them as my quarterly reward. I'm a member of their rewards program so for every purchase I make, I get a % back (I think it was like 2%) every quarter. But in today's mail they said my Reward percentage has been upgraded to 5%.

Since I'm sorta running low on empty inkjet cartridges, I just bought 150 empty cartridges on ebay (free shipping). I paid .60 per cartridge so that will each turn into a $3 Staples coupon when I recycle them. So for every $9 I spend at Staples, its really like I spent $1.80. Plus I will be getting 5% back. Then if I really want to double dip, I can charge all my Staples purchases on my Discover card for their cash back bonus. (We pay off our credit cards every month so I don't need to be concerned with paying interest etc).

We got a whopping .25" of snow (if that!) overnight so of course schools were closed today. No, I am not kidding. Bunch of namby pamby wimps who run the schools here. They say "oh we do it for the safety of the kids...their safety is #1". It's the same school system who sent my child home the first day of pre-k with a loop of yarn around his neck with a name tag. Heck, if I had worn something similar during my years of working at the nuke plant, I would have been written up for wearing a safety hazard.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

For the past 1.5 years, I had kinda been wondering why no one has signed my guestbook on the main page of my website http://www.yardsalequeen.com. Every so often I'd check it and see that the last entry was from November 2005. I thought about taking it down since maybe it made the website look "dated" or something. Or perhaps that signing guestbooks are so 90's and just something that no one ever does anymore.

So after I updated the website the other day, I decided to do a "test" of my guestbook and sign it for the hell of it. Afterwards I see a notice "guestbook entry will be added once approved by the webmaster". Doh! LOL! I must have changed it to make it so I had to approve all entries because it was getting so much spam and I totally forgot that I did that!

So I logged in to the guestbook account and see hundreds of entries waiting for my approval. LOL! Most are still spam though for prescription drugs and it will take a long time to sift thru page after page of the bad entries. But so far I have I managed to find several legitimate entries among the spam.

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Here's a pic of a male red bellied woodpecker that was at my suet feeder today. Why they are called red bellied, I don't know.

We have a full sized Tempest video game that we bought in the early 90's (before ebay) and for the past 5 years it hasn't worked. My husband knows about electronics (I figure if he can explain in detail every aspect of how a nuclear power plant works, he should be able to fix an old video game). And ta-da, he did. Another situation of: why didn't we fix this years ago.

Friday, February 02, 2007

I am a Staples shopping addict because of the $3 coupons you get when turning in HP, Dell and Lexmark cartridges for recycling. I buy the empty cartridges on ebay and then take them to Staples for recycling. Sometimes I find the cartridges at thrifts super cheap (I bought one earlier this week at a thrift store for .25 which I turned in for a $3 coupon). Today I found these Crayola marker kits on clearance for $2 each, so I bought 3 and used two $3 coupons for a grand total of $0.

My husband had the day off so we spent several hours shopping and having lunch. The other day I printed out a 15% coupon to use at JC Penneys from taking a survey at http://www.jcpsurvey.com (you enter in the data from a previous receipt). I "splurged" and bought myself this cute Rolfs wallet. Original price was $36, on clearance for $16.99, then 50% off that, and then additional 15% off. Price came out to be $7.22 plus tax.

I wish I knew these things existed 30 years ago!! When I was in the 3rd grade, my parents bought me a nice bedroom set (twin bed, a chest of drawers and big long dresser with mirror) that I used forever (and still is in great shape). Except the sliders on several of the drawers are broken. When I was a kid, I overstuffed the drawers and broke a little plastic piece that the drawers would slide on. But of course I still continued to use the furniture but had to be careful when pulling out the drawers since they would not stay open on their own.

I mention it to my husband today how it would be nice if he installed some new sliders or something in the furniture so it wouldn't be a pain for Jacob to open the drawers. I figured it would be impossible to find the exact plastic part from decades ago but my husband was sure that "drawer technology" hasn't changed much over the years. And voila! Right at Lowes and at less than $2 a package are the little plastic dohickys that we need. If only I had looked for them 30 years ago! Anyhow, I am so excited about finding these!

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Happy February. My son did his schedule for the month - I thought it was cute.

Well I'm biting the bullet and not going to Smile today. I have so much stuff to do at home. Plus, it's snowing a little and no use going out and getting my car dirty unless I really have to. I hate getting all that water on the floor of the garage from melting chunks of snow stuck to the car.

I have to get our health care account for 2006 straightened out. I swear it's driving me nuts. I hate it. I am so glad we are not going to use it again this year, not worth the hassle at all. In 2006 thru my husband's employer we used http://www.wageworks.com you put in a certain amount of money (your choice of how much) and the benefit of that is that you're issued a debit card to use in stores for over the counter medicines and doctor co-pays. Well the real benefit is that you don't pay taxes on that money, as long as its going toward your health. Ugghh so last year they changed it and now you have to submit receipts for everything you used the card for. Otherwise you will have to pay THEM back even though its YOUR money! What a frickin headache. So not worth the hassle. Well on the plus side, I am getting pretty good at using the fax feature of my scanner/printer since I have to fax them all these forms and receipts and then do it again when they tell me I'm using the wrong form.

Yardsalequeen.com

I have a wide variety of interests: going to yard sales, garage sales, thrift stores, estate sales and rummage sales. After I had my son Jacob in 2000, I quit my job at a nuclear power plant after almost 10 years. Now I just sit home, eat bonbons and watch Ellen while I plan my strategy to hit next week's yardsales. Laugh. Dance. Yardsale.